[jbosstools-dev] How should we deal with components of projects which have not changed since JBT 4.1.0.Final (eg., jbosstools-base/runtime) ?

[Nick Boldt]

In looking at the JBT 4.1.1.Alpha2 build [1], I see that some features 
have not yet changed since JBT 4.1.0.Final [2]. This is fine for a 
project like GWT or Freemarker, where the entire project is versioned 
the same way and we can simply include the previous .Final release, but 
for a subcomponent of a project, like the runtime component in 
jbosstools-base [3], this presents a question.

[1] http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/nightly/core/4.1.kepler/

[2] http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/kepler/

[3] 
http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/builds/staging/jbosstools-base_41/all/repo/

Currently, the base build [3] is producing this plugin:

org.jboss.tools.runtime.core 2.1.0.Alpha2-v20130927-0137-B114

But the JBT 4.1.1.Alpha2 build [1] contains this version, which is 
code-wise identical except for the qualifier change in the manifest.

org.jboss.tools.runtime.core 2.1.0.Final-v20130717-0450-B102

Where it becomes an issue is that when we start building 4.1.1.Final in 
November, we will be including both 2.1.0.Final-v20130717-0450-B102 
(from JBT 4.1.0.Final) and 2.1.0.Final-v20131200-0000-Bxxx (from JBT 
4.1.1.Final). Since these are bitwise identical, there's no point making 
users update from an identical feature or plugin to a newer identical 
version.

So how do we prevent the build from including a newer-versioned but 
identical feature or plugin?

The only thing I can currently think of is to *exclude* these features 
from the base_41 update site [3] so that only the older version from [2] 
will be included.

This is basically the process I used to build JBT 4.1.0.1 - I excluded 
everything from jbosstools-central's site/category.xml except the 
feature which had actually changed [4].

[4] 
https://github.com/jbosstools/jbosstools-central/commit/16279020cbf872f4eac59a36a77df01edb2ed832

Looking for feedback here -- is this a good idea?


-- 
Nick Boldt :: JBoss by Red Hat
Productization Lead :: JBoss Tools & Dev Studio
http://nick.divbyzero.com